Monthly Archives: February 2017

I had the pleasure of presenting a lecture about Civil War portrait photography yesterday afternoon at the Center for Civil War Studies on the campus of Virginia Tech. The talk, Cardomania! How the carte de visite became the Facebook of the 1860s, explains that the carte de visite format is a blip on the timeline of photographic history, wedged between the beauty of the daguerreotype and the technical improvements later in the 19th century. But during its heyday in the 1860s, the its affordability, reproducibility and shareability made it a social media powerhouse.

The event could not have happened without professors Paul Quigley, director of the Center, and Kurt Luther. Kurt, by the way, is the author of Photo Sleuth, a column in Military Images magazine. My sincere thanks to them for the efforts to help all of us better understand and appreciate the Civil War.